Motor Vehicles and Parts News
- Chery aims to combine quality, low price
Date: 25-Sep-2007 Sources: (Shenzhen Daily)
WHEN Chery Automobile, China's only big carmaker without a foreign joint venture partner, signed a deal in July to supply small cars to Chrysler, it was the first formal recognition that a homegrown car was good enough for the U.S. market.
But Chery is no high-priced brand in its home country.
Chery, China's fourth-largest carmaker and one of its fastest-growing carmakers, makes one of its cheapest models: the hot-selling QQ, which at a list price as low as 40,000 yuan (US$5,330) costs less than a vehicle license in Shanghai. Its most expensive model lists for about 200,000 yuan.
Chery executives last week revealed their formula for combining quality and low cost: not scrimping on parts, equipment and top talent.
In the assembly plant and paint shop for the compact A1, which Chrysler plans to roll out in U.S. showrooms in 2009 under its own badge, robots do most of the work.
The A1 was built with the help of Italian design house Bertone and is powered by a 1.3-liter engine developed with the aid of Austrian engineering firm AVL.
'We spent handsomely on equipment and ordered parts from the best suppliers such as Bosch, Delphi and Valeo,'said Zhou Biren, Chery's English-speaking vice president.
'But it was money well-spent as it will enable us to build quality cars at affordable prices.'
He declined to disclose how much Chery had spent on equipment but another company executive said a single testing facility imported from Germany costs 300,000 euros (US$419,400), 10 times as much as a domestically made version, and Chery runs 13 such facilities.
Chery has the backing of the local government in Anhui, a largely agricultural province which is eager to build up its auto industry.
Brisk demand for its models also helps to finance investments, executives said.
From January to July, it sold 197,923 vehicles, ranking it No. 4 in China, the world's second-largest auto market after the United States. The top three are joint ventures of Volkswagen AG or General Motors Corp.
Most domestic carmakers have, until recently, counted on locally made versions of foreign brands to drive sales.
Chery, however, has since day one pursued an independent path aiming to create a national brand, with the aid of imported facilities, outsourced designs and veteran engineers and designers hired from Chrysler, Volkswagen, Ford Motor and others.
'Why make foreign brands? Why couldn't China have its own national brand which is just as good??said Jin Yibo, vice president of Chery's sales arm who joined the company in 1998.
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